3 ms·

Scientific progress isn't in a 1:1 ratio with funding.

• no_identd 9y ago
  True, but misleading. On a local scale, the ratio seems significantly worse than 1:1. On a global scale, due to interdisciplinary synergies, it seems to exceed 1:1. I feel like one could draw some connection from this to the fact that technological progress seems to grow at a quadratic-hyperbolic (and not an exponential, as Ray Kurzweil would have you believe) rate, but alas, I can't think of a way to do so right now.
  • ksk 9y ago
    >On a global scale, due to interdisciplinary synergies, it seems to exceed 1:1. How does it seem to do that? If you're going to call somebody misleading, might as well go through the effort of linking to data that you consider 'not misleading'.
  • Brockenstein 9y ago
    I would have to argue that refinements to our processes for acquiring and sharing knowledge is probably a big player. Yes you need funding for research and more funding helps. More money isn't some sort of guarantee of results though. I would also have to argue that a lot of our technological progress comes from an existing infrastructure and incremental improvements. We have a lot of momentum driving rapid incremental improvements, money does sustain that system, but an infinite amount of money isn't going to yield infinite improvements. And simple more money isn't always going to yield multiples worth of improvements. One of the reason is some things just end up being dead ends. Or some other dependency doesn't exist yet. We've been making transistor, silicon based, x86 CPU's for 40+ years now. ARM is 33 years old. And we're just making improvements and refinements to those and to most technology for that matter. I would have to so the only thing that's growing at a quadratic-hyperbolic rate is adoption and application, not the technology itself.